Racist computer jails Aussie kids

An Aussie police computer has been ordering the arrest of kids, aboriginals and other ethnic minorities.

Musa Konneh was arrested, handcuffed, strip searched and spent a night in the police cells after the police computer system said that he had breached his bail conditions by not reporting to police.

Konneh had been on bail for the terrible crime of riding on the train without a ticket but the case had been chucked out of the Children’s Court four days earlier. The court knew this but the copper’s computer system failed, again.

Now, according to AP, a class action has been filed in the Supreme Court against the NSW government over this and other arrests which came at the inspiration of the dodgy computer system.

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre and the law firm Maurice Blackburn is asking that other young people banged up for a breach of bail conditions to sign up to the class action.

Its case is that the cops were insane to arrest people when their COPS database was about as accurate as Macworld covering a security flaw in an iPhone.

There had been problems with COPS for years, and Blackburn’s NSW managing principal, Ben Slade thinks that there could have been more than 200 kids falsely arrested in similar conditions.

So far 22 people had been paid $2.7 million in compensation for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment because of the computer problem.

However there is something else connected to the arrests – apparently there were a lot more demands for the arrests of children and Aboriginals. Konneh was from Sierra Leone. It looks like the computer might have been programmed to be racist.